Minutes. Hours. Half a day gone now.
Folly to think he could touch the Lady’s mind in sleep. Folly to think he could float effortlessly into Inner Temple and win her aid. Folly to think he could regain Castle Mount, or that he had ever had it at all. He had propelled himself halfway around the world on no force other than folly, and now, he thought bitterly, he would have the reward of his presumption and his foolishness.
Then at last he heard the familiar faint whine. But it was not the food-slot opening: it was the door.
Two white-haired hierarchs entered the cell. They favored him with a look of bleak and sour bafflement.
“Have you come to deliver my breakfast?” Valentine asked.
“We have come,” said the taller one, “to conduct you to Inner Temple.”
11
He insisted that they feed him first—a wise move, for the trip proved to be a lengthy one, all the rest of the day by swift mount-drawn floater-wagon. The hierarchs sat flanking him in chilly silence throughout. When he asked a question—the name of some terrace through which they were passing, for example—they would reply in the fewest possible words; otherwise they offered no chatter.
Third Cliff had many terraces—Valentine lost count after about seven—and they were much closer together than those of the outer cliffs, with only token strips of forest separating them. This central zone of the Isle seemed a busy and populous place.
At twilight they came to the Terrace of Adoration, a domain of serene gardens and rambling low buildings of whitewashed stone. Like all the other terraces it was circular in outline, but it was much smaller than the others, here at the innermost part of the island, a mere ringlet that probably could be walked in all its circumference in an hour or two, whereas it might take months to complete the circuit of a First Cliff terrace. Ancient gnarled trees with close-set oval leaves rose at regular intervals along its rampart. Bowers of richly blossoming vines coiled between the buildings; small courtyards were everywhere, decorated with slender pillars of polished black stone and bedecked with flowering shrubs. In twos and threes the servants of the Lady moved quietly through these peaceful precincts. Valentine was conducted to a chamber far more gracious than his last, with a broad sunken bath, an inviting bed, windows facing into a garden, baskets of fruit on the table. The hierarchs left him here. He bathed, nibbled fruit, waited for the next event. That was some time in arriving, an hour or more: a knock on the door, a soft voice asking if he wished dinner, a cart rolled into the room bearing more substantial fare than he had had since coming to the Isle—grilled meats, blue gourds artfully stuffed with minced fish, a beaker of something cold that might almost have been wine. Valentine ate eagerly. Afterward he stood by his windows a long time, studying the darkness. He saw nothing; he heard no one. He tested his door: locked. So he was still a prisoner, although in far more pleasing surroundings than before.
He slept a dreamless sleep. A flood of golden sunlight cascading into his room awakened him. He bathed; the same discreet servitor appeared outside, with a breakfast of sausages and stewed pink fruit; and a short while after he was done the two somber hierarchs came to him, saying, “The Lady has summoned you this morning.”
They led him through a garden of marvelous beauty and across a slender bridge of pure white stone that rose in a gentle arch above a dark pond in which golden fish swam in sparkling patterns. Ahead lay a wondrously manicured greensward. At the center of it was a one-story building of great size, extraordinarily delicate in form, with long narrow wings radiating in the form of starbeams from the circular center.
This could only be Inner Temple, Valentine thought.
Now he trembled. He had journeyed, for more months than he could remember, toward this very spot, toward the threshold of the mysterious woman whose realm this was, whom he fancied to be his mother. At last he was here; and what if it proved all to be foolishness, or fantasy, or terrible error? What if he was no one in particular, a yellow-haired idler from Zimroel, bereft of his memory through some stupidity and filled by trifling companions with nonsensical ambitions? The thought was unbearable. If the Lady repudiated him now, if she denied him—
He entered the temple.
The hierarchs still close at his sides, Valentine marched endlessly down an impossibly elongated entrance hall that was guarded every twenty feet by a grim-faced rigid warrior, and into an interior room, octagonal in shape, with walls of the finest white stone and a pool, octagonal also, at its center. Morning light entered through an open eight-sided skylight. At each corner of the room stood a stern figure in hierarchical robes. Valentine, a little dazed, looked from one to the next and saw no welcome on their faces, only a sort of pursed-lip disapproval.
There was a single note of music, softly swelling, then dying away, and when it was gone the Lady of the Isle was in the room.
She seemed much like the figure Valentine had seen so often in dreams: a woman of middle years and ordinary height, dusky of skin, with glossy black hair, warm soft eyes, a full mouth that hovered always at the edge of a smile, a silver band at her brow, and, yes, a flower behind one ear, with many thick green petals. It seemed, though, that there was an aura about her, a nimbus, a radiance of force and authority and majesty, such as befitted the Power of Majipoor that she was, and he had not been prepared for that, expecting as he had been only the warm motherly woman, and forgetting that she was a queen, a priestess, almost a goddess, as well. He stood speechless before her, and for a long moment she studied him from the far side of the pool, her gaze resting lightly but penetratingly on his face. Then she waved one hand sharply in an unmistakable gesture of dismissal. Not of him: of the hierarchs. Their glacial calm was broken by that. They looked to one another, obviously confused. The Lady repeated the gesture, a mere shallow snap of the wrist, and something imperious flashed in her eyes, a look of almost terrifying strength. Three or four of the hierarchs left the room; the others dawdled, as if not believing that the Lady proposed to be left alone with the prisoner. For an instant it seemed that a third wave of her hand might be necessary, as one of the oldest and most imposing of the hierarchs extended a quivering arm toward her in a motion of obvious protest. But at a glance from the Lady the hierarch’s arm dropped back to his side. Slowly the last of them went out of the room.
Valentine fought the impulse to fall to his knees.
He said in a barely audible voice, “I have no idea of the proper obeisance to make. Nor do I know, Lady, how I should address you, without giving offense.”
Calmly she replied, “It will be enough, Valentine, if you call me Mother.”
The quiet words stunned him. He took a faltering few steps toward her, halted, stared.
“Is it so?” he asked in a whisper.
“There can be no doubt of it.”
He felt his cheeks ablaze. He stood helpless, numbed by her grace. She beckoned to him, the tiniest movement of her fingertips, and he shook as though he were caught in an ocean gale.
“Come close,” she said. “Are you afraid? Come to me, Valentine!”
He crossed the room, went round the pool, drew near her. She put her hands into his. Instantly he felt a jolt of energy, a tangible, palpable throbbing, somewhat akin to what he had felt when Deliamber touched him to do wizardry-work, but enormously more powerful, enormously more awesome. He would have withdrawn his hands at that first throb of force, but she held him, and he could not, and her eyes close by his seemed to be seeing through him, entering all his mysteries.
“Yes,” she said finally. “By the Divine, yes, Valentine, your body is strange but your soul is of my own making! Oh, Valentine, Valentine, what have they done to you? What have they done to Majipoor?” She tugged at his hands, and pulled him close to her, and then he was in her arms, the Lady straining upward to embrace him, and he felt her trembling now, no goddess but only a woman, a mother holding her troubled son. In her grasp he felt such peace as he had not known since his awakening in Pidruid, and he clung to her,
praying she would never release him.
Then she stood back and surveyed him, smiling. “You were given a handsome body, at least. Nothing like what you once were, but pleasing to the eye, and strong as well, and healthy. They could have done much worse. They could have made you something weak and sickly and deformed, but I suppose they lacked the courage, knowing that eventually they would be repaid tenfold for all their crimes.”
“Who, Mother?”
She seemed surprised at his question. “Why, Barjazid and his brood!”
Valentine said, “I know nothing, Mother, except what has come to me in dreams, and even that has been befogged and muddled.”
“And what is it that you know?”
“That my body has been taken from me, that in some witchery of the King of Dreams I was left outside Pidruid as you see me, that someone else, I think it may be Dominin Barjazid, rules now from Castle Mount. But I know all this only in the most untrustworthy of ways.”
“It is all true,” the Lady replied.
“When was it that this happened?”
“In early summer,” she said. “When you made the grand processional in Zimroel. I have no knowledge of how it was done; but one night as I lay sleeping I felt a wrenching, a tearing, as of the heart of the planet being ripped loose, and I awakened knowing that something evil and monstrous had occurred, and I sent out my soul toward you and was unable to reach you. There was only a silence where you had been, a void. Yet it was different from the silence that struck me when Voriax was slain, for I still felt your presence, but beyond my reach, as if behind a thick sheet of glass. I asked at once for news of the Coronal. He is in Til-omon, my people told me. And is he well? I asked. Yes, they said, he is well; he sails today toward Pidruid. But I could make no contact, Valentine. I sent forth my soul as I had not done in years, to every part of the world, and you were nowhere and somewhere, both at once. I was frightened and confused, Valentine, but I could do nothing but seek and wait, and news came to me that Lord Valentine had reached Pidruid, that he was guest in the mayor’s grand house, and I had a vision of him across all this distance and his face was the face of my son. But his mind was other, and it was closed to me. I attempted a sending, and I could not send to him. And at last I began to understand.”
“Did you know where I was?”
“Not at first. They had switched your mind so well it was altogether changed. Night after night I cast my soul forth into Zimroel in search of you—neglecting everything else here, but this was no trifling matter, this substitution of Coronals—and I thought I felt glimmers, a shard of your true self, a fragment—and after a time I was able to determine that you were alive, that you were in northwestern Zimroel, but there was still no reaching you. I had to wait until you had awakened more to yourself, until their witcheries had faded a bit and your true mind was restored at least in part.”
“It is still far from whole, Mother.”
“I know that. But that can be remedied, I believe.”
“When did you finally reach me?”
She paused a moment in thought. “It was near the Ghayrog city, I think, Dulorn, and I saw you first through the minds of others who were dreaming the truth about you. And I touched their minds. I refined and clarified what was in them, and I saw that your soul had imprinted its stamp on them and that they knew better than you did yourself what had befallen you. I circled about you in this way, and then I was able to enter you. And from that moment on you have gained in knowledge of your former self, as I have labored across so many thousands of miles to heal you and to draw you to me. But none of it was easy. The world of dreams, Valentine, is a difficult and shifting place, even for me, and to attempt to control it is like writing a book in the sand beside an ocean: the tide returns and obliterates nearly everything, and you just write it again, and again and again. But at last you are here.”
“Did you know it when I reached the Isle?”
“I knew it, yes. I could feel your closeness.”
“And yet you let me drift for months from terrace to terrace!”
She laughed. “There are millions of pilgrims in the outer terraces. Sensing you was one thing, actually locating you another, far more difficult. Besides, you were not ready to come to me, nor I to receive you. I was testing you, Valentine. Watching you from afar, studying to see how much of your soul had survived, whether there still was any of the Coronal remaining in you. Before I acknowledged you I had to know these things.”
“And does much of Lord Valentine remain in me, then?”
“A great deal. Far more than your enemies could ever suspect. Their scheme was faulty: they thought they had expunged you, when they only fuddled and disordered you.”
“Would it not have been wiser for them to have killed me outright, than to have put my soul in some other body?”
“Wiser, yes,” the Lady replied. “But they did not dare. Yours is an anointed spirit, Valentine. These Barjazids are superstitious beasts; they will risk overthrowing a Coronal, it seems, but not destroying him altogether, for fear of your spirit’s vengeance. And their cowardly hesitation now will bring about the ruin of their scheme.”
Valentine said softly, “Do you think I can ever regain my place?”
“Do you doubt it?”
“Barjazid wears the face of Lord Valentine. The people accept him as Coronal. He controls the power of Castle Mount. I have perhaps a dozen followers and am unknown. If I proclaim myself rightful Coronal, who will believe me? And how long then before Dominin Barjazid deals with me the way he should have dealt with me in Til-omon?”
“You have the support of the Lady your mother.”
“And have you an army, Mother?”
The Lady smiled gently. “I have no army, no. But I am a Power of Majipoor, which is not a small thing. I have the strength of righteousness and love, Valentine. I also have this.”
She touched the silver circlet at her brow.
“Through which you make your sendings?” Valentine asked.
“Yes. Through which I can reach the minds of all Majipoor. I lack the ability of the Barjazids to control and direct, which their devices are capable of doing. But I can communicate, I can guide, I can influence. You will have one of these circlets before you leave the Isle.”
“And I’ll go quietly through Alhanroel, beaming messages of love to the citizens, until Dominin Barjazid descends from the Mount and gives me back the throne?”
The Lady’s eyes flashed with the kind of anger Valentine had seen in them when she was sending the hierarchs from the room.
“What sort of talk is that?” she snapped.
“Mother—”
“Oh, they have changed you! The Valentine I bore and reared accepted no thought of defeat.”
“Nor do I, Mother. But it all seems so immense, and I’m so weary. And to make war against citizens of Majipoor—even against a usurper—Mother, there’s been no war on Majipoor since earliest times. Am I the one to break the peace?”
Her eyes were merciless. “The peace is already broken, Valentine. It falls to you to restore the order of the realm. A false Coronal has reigned nearly a year now. Cruel and foolish laws are proclaimed daily. The innocent are punished, the guilty flourish. Balances constructed thousands of years ago are being destroyed. When our people came here from Old Earth, fourteen thousand years past, many mistakes were made, much suffering was endured, before we found our way of government, but since the time of the first Pontifex we have lived without major upheaval, and since the time of Lord Stiamot there has been peace on this world. Now there has been a rupture of that peace, and it falls to you to put things to rights.”
“And if I accept what Dominin Barjazid has done? If I decline to embroil Majipoor in civil war? Would the consequences be so evil?”
“You know the answers to those questions already.”
“I would hear them from you, because my resolve wavers.”
“It shames me to hear you speak those words.”
/> “Mother, I have undergone strange things on this journey and they have taken much of my strength. Am I not allowed a moment of fatigue?”
“You are a king, Valentine.”
“I was, perhaps, and perhaps will be again. But much of my kingliness was stolen from me in Til-omon. I am an ordinary man now. And not even kings are immune to weariness and discouragement, Mother.”
In a tone more gentle than the one she had been using, the Lady said, “The Barjazid does not yet rule as an absolute tyrant, for that might turn the people against him, and he is still insecure in his power—while you live. But he rules for himself and for his family, not for Majipoor. He lacks a sense of right, and does only what seems useful and expedient. As his confidence grows, so too will his crimes, until Majipoor groans under the whip of a monster.”
Valentine nodded. “When I am not so weary, I see that, yes.”
“Think, too, of what will happen when the Pontifex Tyeveras dies, which must sooner or later happen, and more probably sooner than later.”
“Barjazid goes to the Labyrinth then, and becomes a powerless recluse. Is that what you mean?”
“The Pontifex is not powerless, and he does not need to be a recluse. In your lifetime there has been only Tyeveras, growing older and older and steadily more strange. But a Pontifex in full vigor is a very different entity. What if Barjazid is Pontifex five years from now? Do you think he’ll be content to sit in that underground hole the way Tyeveras now does? He’ll rule with force, Valentine.” She looked at him intently. “And who do you think will become Coronal?”
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